I wish we had been successful at converting people from /r/MachineLearning. Some of the moderators deleted their accounts and tried to create a place on kbin. I think there's maybe a need for a more academic focussed instance on machine learning.
Andrej Karpathy used to comment on reddit and was well liked there. I don't know, maybe we'll get lucky with Mastodon continuing to slowly convert X users. It seems like they like to show up here sometimes, Mastodon's format seems better for federation, it's just maybe lacking work on search engines for discovery. Then again, Andrej was leading Tesla AI, so that's a conflict to X.
I was just commenting this because I saw it downvoted.
edit:
I think I'm just annoyed with reddit, they're banning people using VPNs, etc. The place doesn't matter, but it's related to moderation, people posting content, and maybe features of the service? Then again, the service Vitalik Buterin has been recommending just uses IFrames and doesn't focus on any specific feature. Like I imagine someone could create a really interesting federated service that integrates notebooks better, there's just lots of room for customization in the fediverse... Though, I don't know if it's really necessary.
I do think subs like /r/AskDocs would have been interesting to see what happened if doctors had moved and used their mastodon handles instead of reddit verfication. (Though, that sub might have failed if anyone had to reveal their identity)
I guess, just like, what could have happened if a University ran an instance? I don't know, if I'm to believe Peter Thiel, it's just a bunch of banned users. I'm so off topic now, but I am just like hoping something better than reddit finds its way into existence.
It also needs more reliability and a better funding model. I had complex ideas for collateral funding I thought about for fun, but a simple bounty system for goals might be effective.
I'm not really sure what's going on with Lemmy development. If I was writing contributions for it, I would probably focus on making federation perfect between services first, because I think that's very important to users. Though, I'm not, and haven't submitted any pull requests. I did write stuff to pull all comments and posts from instances though as a start towards that goal, but that was more so for fun.
edit: As an example, I would absolutely donate $1 if you found 1000 other people to also donate $1 for a specific development goal. Lemmy.world has 6,000 people every day, I think it's possible to raise some money for specific development goals.